Lessons in the Sun: School Days in Mallorca
When I think about my years of schooling in Mallorca, what comes to mind first—surprisingly—isn’t anxiety or rebellion or feeling out of place. It’s happiness. Which is a bit of a miracle, given the chaos humming away in the background of our family life at the time.
When we first arrived, I must’ve been five or six. I was enrolled at the British School in Son Rapinya. I’ve already talked about my first day there—how I bolted and hid behind the house in blind terror at the idea of going somewhere new. But despite the shaky start, it turned out to be a gentle little primary school, and I settled in quickly.
Not long after that, I was moved to Bellver—short for Bellver International School in San Agustín. There were only a handful of English-language schools on the island back then: Bellver, the American School, and Baleares International. You’ve got to remember, this was Franco’s Spain. The state education system wasn’t exactly luring in expats, most of whom were fairly well-heeled and expected something a little more rigorous (and, frankly, English).
Bellver was housed in an huge old townhouse with a rabbit warren of rooms. I don’t remember a huge amount, apart from a largely forgettable fistfight with a boy named Edwin. It involved me landing a single, vaguely impressive punch to the nose while a gaggle of classmates cheered us on. All very primary school.
The real shift came when a new school was announced: King’s College, modeled on the traditional British system—uniforms, structure, all that jazz. It was a big deal at the time, and my mum signed me up immediately. I remember being there on the very first day it opened, standing with a bunch of other kids in brand-new uniforms outside what had once been a nunnery in Genova. The building still had a faintly sacred, echoey feel to it—like the ghosts of long-departed nuns were judging us as we played British Bulldog in the dust.
King’s College (which would later become Queen’s College after I left) had a very proper feel to it. Mr. Quinn was the headmaster, Miss Jones the headmistress. I remember going to collect my school uniform from Galerías Preciados, Palma’s version of Harrods. The girls had little kilted skirts, the boys wore trousers or shorts—I opted for long trousers because I was mortified by my skinny legs.
I had apparently done well enough at Bellver to be bumped up a year. Why, I’m not entirely sure—I wasn’t particularly diligent, and my aptitude mostly came in the form of random flashes of inspiration and a flair for storytelling. But I found myself slightly younger than the rest of my class, which would become more noticeable (and awkward) once puberty hit my female classmates and I was still waiting for my invitation to the hormone party.
My memories of King’s College are largely warm. It was a small school, which meant it had a kind of village atmosphere. I was in a class with mostly girls and a few familiar names still pop up on Facebook now and then—Finlay Love, Nicky Fremgen, Mia Pearce (who I didn’t give a second thought to at the time, but who would later become the subject of a major post-Mallorca crush, as all good memoirs demand).
There were trips. One ski trip to the Pyrenees stands out. Two teachers, a gang of kids, dormitories divided by gender. Mr. Locke was in charge of the boys and made a casual comment one evening that a Canadian girl named Kim Cooper had a crush on me. That was all I needed. I spent the rest of the trip giving Kim one-on-one ski lessons (I was the only one who knew how to ski), beaming like a lovesick Labrador. She was polite but, I suspect, mildly bewildered by my full-court press of probably unwanted devotion. Mr. Locke was definitely mistaken.
There were more questionable moments. A raucous game of British Bulldog in the school's lower field ended when someone decided to upgrade the rules by adding rocks to the mix. A real rock to the head shut that experiment down fast. I still remember the blood and Miss Jones’s face when she saw me.
We weren’t taught in Spanish, but it was a compulsory subject. And while my command of the language remained pretty basic during school hours, things would shift dramatically once I entered the world of motorbikes and made actual Spanish friends. But that came later.
A big part of my school life also included Natasha—my niece. She started at King’s College in the early years, barely out of nappies, wearing her tiny uniform with serious determination. Natasha had come to live with us for a time, courtesy of my sister Briony’s jet-set lifestyle and her rich boyfriend, John Bredenkamp (who deserves a chapter of his own, eventually). I think Natasha found more consistency with my mum than she ever had with Briony, and she became part of the household—quietly but indelibly.
Looking back, my schooling in Mallorca wasn’t just about academics. It was a grounding force in a time when everything else—my family, my home life, the entire foundation of what I thought life was—was either shifting or about to. School became a sort of anchor. Familiar faces. Predictable routines. Playgrounds and pencil cases and awkward crushes. The calm between domestic storms.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was, in its way, safe. And for a kid like me, safety mattered more than anything.